Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Some of you may remember a little company called Bungie that, back in the day, made cool games for the Mac like Marathon and Myth. As time went on they sold themselves to Microsoft and their Mac games kinda went away in favor of new games for the XBox and other consoles.

You may have heard of one of the games they created for the XBox during that time. It’s called Halo.

Anyway, in 2007 Bungie split from Microsoft and went on its own again. Since then they’ve made some new games and are now set to launch a brand new title we think looks pretty cool: Destiny.

There’s a new trailer for the game. Check it out after the break. Welcome back Bungie.

Microsoft knows that Halo is a system seller. That’s why last year at E3 we saw the TBD titled Halo get a tease. But without knowing when the next Halo would be coming out, they needed to keep the appetite wet for gamers before the hoopla of this year’s E3 kicked in. What better way to do so than open up preorders to the world. If you head to Amazon you can place your preorder on Halo 5: Guardians which is set to ship by end of year 2015 (no doubt, this will be more formally announced with an actual release date at E3 or at least a quarter).

There are two things that stand out about Halo 5: Guardians based off the current cover artwork. The first is the name. Since Halo: Combat Evolved, this is the first proper Halo title to have a suffix attached to it. This leads one to believe it is either because they feel just another number isn’t enough of a differentiator to keep motivating new purchases or these new Guardians are that essential to the plot.

Yesterday, Microsoft dropped what they were hoping would be a bomb, but has truthfully only ended up being a cause for more contention in the console war. After about six months of being outsold by the PlayStation 4, Microsoft has announced they will be releasing a Kinect-free version of the XBox One. Hitting shelves on June 9th, this will be just in time for the E3 frenzy and most likely hope to capitalize on new titles being announced at E3 bringing more popularity to the system. It will also drop the price to $399.

Instead of people being happy about the new lower price, the negative backlash came. Sony fanboys decried the move as desperation. While it can be said that Microsoft did need to do something to put the console on even ground with the PlayStation, it wouldn’t be an act of desperation.

Microsoft listened to the feedback and instead of dropping the price and losing money due to cost, they removed the big elephant in the room that was associated with that higher price point. Had they kept the Kinect and dropped the price or dropped the Kinect and lowered the price below the $399 mark before Sony had enacted any price drop at all on the PlayStation 4, that would have been an act of desperation.

For the geek and gamer in your life (or, for yourself, why not?) one of the best gifts to give this holiday season is a game, console or other video gaming peripheral. Of course, the folks at GameStop are rolling out the, um, black carpet for Black Friday and have lots of deals to satisfy everyone on your list.

After hiring an additional 17,000 people to help staff its stores, the company has now announced its range of Black Friday deals. Here’s the full list, all of which are only available on Friday:

When the original Kinect launched in 2010, it is safe to say the peripheral had a share of flaws. It wasn’t as detailed as one would expect and couldn’t detect hands and fingers the way it was originally designed to. It also had a hard time reading individuals under a certain height. Considering Microsoft was trying to drive kids to play games like Kinectimals with the controllerless gaming, that was up there in the list of top functionality f&#* ups from them.

One that also seemed to be an issue was the rumor that the Kinect also had trouble reading people with darker skin tone. This lead to the premise that the Kinect was actually racist.

The team at Whiskey and Waffles joined up with Sandwich Productions (because the combination just sounded too damn tasty to ignore) and created the mocumentary simply entitled Racist XBox. We were thrilled with the end result and just how awesome WallE looked as a forensic scientist. We won’t spoil anything here but I will say there is a little bit of mature language so I wouldn’t go showing this to your 10 year old.

The lines were drawn some time ago in this latest generation of the console war. With shots being fired all around since the consoles were officially announced to feature sets and launch titles, things have gotten messy.

And even though we are lucky enough to get review copies of games here on a regular basis, we didn’t get our hands on a freebie for either the XBox One or PlayStation 4. When budget came in to effect, I had to choose which side I’d be backing and since there could be only One… (You see what I did there?)

In the end, it came down to two things. The first is that I have bought both a PlayStation 3 and a Vita but the majority of my collection of games in the last generation were for the XBox 360. More people I knew played multiplayer on XBox 360 so for things like Call of Duty: Ghost and Grand Theft Auto V, that’s where people already were.

And as silly as they might be, I have become an achievement whore over the past 8 years and try as they might, Sony’s trophies don’t have the same effect on me. I cracked over 50,000 in one generation, I need to top it in the next.

Witht the release of Microsoft’s XBox One just two weeks away, the anticipation is, of course, building. Not that fans of the console need another reason to be excited, but Microsoft has gone ahead and given them one (or more) anyway.

How, you may ask? Well, the company has released an extensive video tour of the new console. The hands-on walkthrough with the Xbox One is over 12 minutes and includes a thorough look at the new Windows 8-like dashboard which many people (including this writer) aren’t that crazy about.

Another shot was fired in the next gen console arms race at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany with Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 4’s release date. Sony lauded the PlayStation 4’s release date of November 15th in a number of countries including the US. What was most noticeable though was that Microsoft said nothing during their Gamescom presentation about the release date for the XBox One. Much like E3 where Microsoft making announcements about the XBox One hours before Sony fired off retaliatory comments, Microsoft was scheduled prior to Sony’s conference. This time though, Microsoft chose silence as the safer route.

Instantly, the flame war arouse online with Sony fanboys taking shots at Microsoft and Microsoft fanboys rising to the XBox One’s defense. On some level, it may come across as cowardly for Microsoft to be silent. Instead of coming out looking for a fight by letting the release date of the XBox One out and trying to stand tall, they held back. Strategically though, it was a move they almost had to make. Shy of saying to the world “And it’s out tomorrow”, Microsoft was at risk of Sony letting the PlayStation 4 release date be a week earlier than whatever Microsoft announced.

This next gen console war has already shown that Sony is aggressively taking the fight to Microsoft with the PlayStation 4. So instead of the story being PlayStation vs. XBox, PlayStation gets the attention and then in a week when Microsoft decides to let out their own release date the stories for the mainstream audience will be solely Microsoft focused and finally allowing Microsoft the opportunity to even release earlier than the PlayStation 4.

When I first got this press release, I wasn’t very happy. After all, it was only six months ago I packed my bags and left New England to come to LA and now I find out that there is going to be a gaming show with celebrities being taped in my old backyard. Massachusetts and New Hampshire were just short drives for this Connecticut native. But things aren’t always as they appear at first glance.

A combined effort of Blind Sheep Studios and GameFlak, Celebrity Gaming Challenge takes the term celebrity and stretches it a little thin. Right now, the only thing known about the two celebrity team captains is that they will both be members of the New England Patriots. And the shooting will take place in October, right in the middle of the NFL season.

Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that these celebrity team captains probably aren’t going to be the cream of the Patriots crop. But none the less, I give them credit for their ingenuity and clever use of technicalities of the English language.

Let me start off by saying this is by no means an attack on Sony or the PlayStation 4, so put your flames away. This is just my own opinion on the situation and not meant in any way to talk negatively about the PlayStation 4 and any of its features.

It was announced on Wednesday that Microsoft had changed the DRM features they announced for the XBox One would be removed. Microsoft stated that XBox One owners would now have the ability to play without being logged online every 24 hours or having to worry about the disc being console locked. Immediately, there was a massive outcry saying that it was a huge win for the PlayStation 4.

But that’s not entirely accurate. When you think about it, the huge lead given for the PlayStation 4 announcement happened where it was shown that one console would have these DRM rules while one wouldn’t. As we’ve seen in every race, it’s not over until it’s over.